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The innate meaning of a word token and its semantic meaning
Day fifteen -- Question -- from "sangi39" -- Therefore, this is not a "universal" language as it may have intended to be, but a simple mnemonic device whih would aid in the increased learning speed of the tens of thousands of Chinese characters, but not necessarily the spoken language represented by the script. This method, again, is only able to increase the speed in which the Chinese character inventory, without sound or meaning, can be learnt, and as a result of being Standard Chinese script specific, may actually hinder in the attempts to learn a lot of languages around the world. Answer -- Indeed, there are much, much more in a language than just "word form" of its vocabulary. The Empire State building has 102 floors with two sets of elevators, A and B. Elevator A takes the tourists to the 82nd floor from the lobby. The elevator B goes the rest of way, all the way to the top, 102nd floor. It is not right to condemn the elevator A being useless of not doing the job all the way. I have never claimed that the word root set alone is the whole thing for a language. For Chinese language, the "lesson two" of the book "Chinese Etymology" does discuss the verbal (pronunciations) of Chinese phonetics. As the book is a commercial product, only a brief introduction of that lesson is available online, at: http://www.chinese-word-roots.org/prl020.htm The Chinese grammar is also described in detail in my book "Chinese Word Roots and Grammar" (with US Copyright number TX6-514-465). By all means, the elevator A, although not reaching the top, has done "the most" important job. It takes 10 years for a native Chinese child to learn 3000 to 4000 Chinese characters. With the "Chinese Etymology", anyone (12 years or old) who knows not a single Chinese word can reach that same level with only 300 hours of good study, and this is guaranteed (to the students) and tested times and again. After knowing 3000 to 4000 Characters, all other parts (pronunciation, grammar, etc.) become very easy. Question -- "sangi39" -- So, although this method may actually be a good method for learning to more easily write Chinese characters, it doesn't actually seem to aid in the learning of what the character actually means since one still has to learn that "dào" with the correct pronunciation of consonants and vowels, not to mention the tone, means "way" which is essentially unrelated to the meanings of the radicals which make up the character, which evolved independently of the word "dào" itself, linking only in that the character is the attempt to physically represent the word. Answer -- There is a significant difference between the PB approach and any other languages. Excluding the traditional Chinese word system (as the PB set was derived from it), the "word token" itself of most natural languages carries no "meaning," while its meaning is assigned and agreed in and by its language community. That is, those words have no syntactic meaning but have a semantic meaning. On the contrary, the PB word (Chinese traditional word is now a dialect of PB word) does carry an innate meaning, a direct read out from its composite root members. I can describe this difference as below. 1. PB approach: word token ------> innate meaning ------> Semantic meaning 2. Other approach: Word token ----------------------------------> Semantic meaning Of course, the innate meaning and the semantic meaning can be very different, such as the Chinese word "light" (the innate meaning) can also mean "emptiness". 1. The gap between the word token and its semantic meaning (for any language) is much greater than the gap between the innate meaning and its semantic meaning. 2. Although the gap between the innate meaning and its semantic meaning can sometimes be large, the innate meaning can still be a great memory anchor for that word, and all its semantic meanings can be acquired easily if the word itself is already anchored in the memory. Question -- from "sangi39" -- ... ,and this method may not help in learning a language with a grammar vastly different from that of English and Chinese where, for example, the inceptive mood is expressed by circumflexes or an infix (which would surround the word or break it in two) or which include a morphological paucal number or an OVS word order. Answer -- Seemingly, many of you are still viewing the PreBabel as a conlang, similar to Esperanto which is a "stand alone" conlang. Even if the Esperanto is a universal language, it is not an attractor for all other natural languages. The PreBabel is not a stand alone conlang but an attractor of all natural languages. The difference between the two is so great, and there is no example which can be used to describe it, such as, the gap between Heaven and Earth, etc.. We use the PB set to encode all languages, not to replace them. For English, there is a PreBabel (English) or PB (English) in short, and the PB (English) is a dialect of English. For Russian, there is dialect of PB (Russian), etc.. For a Russian, learning PB (Russian), (when its encoding is complete), will be very easy. Then, this Russian can learn English via PB (English), (when its encoding is complete), and it will be much easier than by learning natural English directly. This is a testable issue as soon as both languages are encoded by a PB set, doesn't have to be the current PB set. In fact, it is a testable issue that learning Russian via PB (Russian), (when there is one there), can be much easier than learning natural Russian directly even by a native Russian person. For Chinese written language, the above test was done many times with success, as there is already a PB (Chinese written language). In all senses, the PB (Chinese) could be the worst PB (languages), as it was encoded by the ancient Chinese with the current PB set. And their encoding logic is very ancient and very heavily culturally laden. The students of Chinese etymology do have some problems for the ancient inferring logic; yet, it is quickly overcome when they place themselves in the ancient time. With this process, they also learned many Chinese culture. Signature -- PreBabel is the true universal language, it is available at http://www.prebabel.info